A present tactic of aircraft pilots in avoiding attacking missiles is to fly in formation of even numbers of aircraft with appropriate spacing between aircraft. This is a very effective tactic and all missiles have some decrease in effectiveness in encounters of this type. When more than one target aircraft are in the missile's field of view, the missile will generally guide toward the centroid of the targets. Prior to impact, resolution occurs, after which only one target is in the missile's field of view. At time of resolution, the missile is heading towards the centroid of the multiple targets, while the antenna is pointing towards a single target.
In the past the change in missile antenna-target pointing direction that occurs at resolution has previously been considered an undesired transient, and some prior missile designs would ground all inputs to the missile autopilot during transient. In this case, the missile heading error subsequent to resolution would have an angular value equal to the angular value of the change in pointing, and the quite slow missile navigation loop (including the feedback from encounter geometry) would then have to provide signals that would tend to cause the missile to reduce its heading error toward zero. Usually, because of insufficient remaining time of flight, large misses would result. On the other hand, other missile designs allow the pointing transient signal to pass, unchanged, to the missile autopilot. A missile of this design would, because of the navigation gain (numerical value of approximately 4), quickly negotiate a heading change of about 4 times the pointing change, resulting in a net heading error of about 3 times the pointing change but opposite in sense. Again, as above, the quite slow missile navigation loop would then have to develop guidance signals to tend to reduce the missile heading error towards zero. The above mentioned tactics against missiles of these designs have resulted in miss distances up to approximately 90 feet.